Challenging the concept that since the discovery of the plague bacillus in 1894 the study of the disease was dominated by bacteriology, Ethnographic Plague argues for the role of ethnography as a vital contributor to the configuration of plague at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Plague has erupted periodically throughout most of human history. The plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, is transmitted by fleas found on many common mammals and through the air as victims develop respiratory symptoms and suffer from coughing spells.

Many of us know the Black Death as a catastrophic event of the medieval world. But the Black Death was arguably the most significant event in Western history, profoundly affecting every aspect of human life, from the economic and social to the political, religious, and cultural. In its wake the plague left a world that was utterly changed, forever altering the traditional structure of European societies and forcing a rethinking of every single system of Western civilization: food production and trade, the church, political institutions, law, art, and more. In large measure, by the profundity of the changes it brought, the Black Death produced the modern world we live in today.

I am a child of the Second Generation of the Shoah. It took me over thirty years to understand. A childhood burdened by the silence of traumatized parents who spoke in Yiddish when they didn’t want their children to understand. A house where the ghosts of my grandparents and my aunts roamed, that my father carried with him everywhere, although trying to look good in a society that wanted to turn the page and build the future. And then one fine day, mourning my little brother who had just ended his own life, my father began to speak. It came out like a dam that suddenly breaks, causing a huge flood. I couldn’t listen. It was too late. It took me years to be able to do so, and then to agree to read his book. In this double trauma, his and mine, between nightmares and anxiety, there are also some funny moments, almost therapeutic releases. Second Generation is not a settling of accounts with my father, or with History. It is an attempt to explain the Second Generation through accurate anecdotes and memories. It is trying to explain a life that became survival

In the late 1340s, a cataclysmic plague shook medieval Europe to its core. The bacterial disease known to us as the Black Death swept westward across the continent, leaving a path of destruction from Crimea and Constantinople to Italy, France, Spain, and ultimately most of Europe, traveling as far west as England and Iceland. Within these locations, the plague killed up to 50% of the population in less than 10 years—a staggering 75 million dead.